The Spanish Cape Mystery

Foreword

In the course of the five years or so during which we have had the pleasure of publishing Mr. Queen’s novels, hundreds of inquiries have been addressed to us demanding an explanation both for the mystery surrounding and the identity of the gentleman who has invariably written the forewords to the Queen books. We regret that we cannot satisfy our correspondents. We do not know.

The Publishers.

I know the place very well, having viewed it innumerable times from the water-side in my modest motorboat, and on at least three occasions panoramically from the air, since Spanish Cape lies on the Atlantic coast directly in the path of a great North-to-South airline.

From the sea it looks for all the world like a gigantic chunk of weathered stone chipped out of some Alpine mother-mountain, sliced roughly down its sides, and plumped into the waters of the Atlantic seaboard to soak its feet thousands of miles from its birthplace. When you get up close to it — as close as those devilish sharp rocks encircling its base permit — it becomes a granite fortress monstrous in its grandeur, impregnable, and overpowering as Gibraltar.

From the sea, as may be imagined, Spanish Cape is a grim and rather chilling object.

But from the air you get an almost poetically different impression. There it lies far below you, a queerly shaped emerald, dark green and mysterious, imbedded in the wrinkled blue moiré of the sea. It is thickly powdered with trees and underbrush; from the height of a ’plane there are only three details which give relief from the prevailing green. One is the sandwhite little beach of the Cove, with its terrace slightly above (although still below the level of the surrounding cliffs in which it is sunken). Another is the house itself, a sprawling and somewhat fantastic-appearing habitation, a hacienda on a grand scale, with stucco facings and patio and Spanish-tile roofs. Yet it is not ugly; merely foreign to the Yankee modernisms about it, like that filling-station which seems so close to it from the air, but which actually is not on Spanish Cape at all, occupying a site on the other side of the public highway.

The third relieving detail is that knife-like sunken road which slashes across the greenery of the Cape, winging straight as an Indian arrow from the public highway down the slender neck of rock connecting the Cape with the mainland, and cutting through the heart of the Cape to the Cove. The sunken road is white from the air and, although I have never set foot on it, I suspect is made of concrete; even at night it glows under the moon.

In common with most of the informed gentry of that stretch of shore I knew that this remarkable rock formation — of course it is the result of millions of years of patiently chewing sea — was the property of Walter Godfrey. Few people knew more, for Godfrey had always exercised the prerogative of excessive riches and shut himself away from the world. I had never met any one who had actually visited Spanish Cape, which was only Godfrey’s summer place, until the dramatic events which shook it — and its owner — out of their traditional isolation; and then, of course, who should the trespasser be but my good friend Ellery Queen! — who seems dogged by a curious destiny.

Much as he struggles against it, Ellery is constantly being either preceded or followed by crimes of a violent nature; to such an extent that a mutual acquaintance, more than half-seriously, once remarked to me: “Every time I ask Queen out to my shack for an evening or a weekend I hold my breath. He attracts murders the way a hound — if he’ll pardon the figure — attracts fleas!”

And so he does. And so, in fact, he did on Spanish Cape.

There are many things about the Problem of the Undressed Man — as Ellery himself refers to it — which are fascinating, outré and downright baffling. It is only rarely in real life that a crime of such peculiar quality occurs in a setting of such extraordinary magnificence. The murder of John Marco, occurring as it did after the Kidnaping-of-the-Wrong-Man, plus the almost weird circumstance of Marco’s nakedness, made for a robust poser; and, now that it is merely another successful Queenian adventure in deduction, for a piece of prime reading.

As usual, I consider myself fortunate to have the privilege of acting the herald in this tragedy of violent errors; and, if my friend will forgive me, of strewing flowers once again in the path of his remarkable mental triumph over what, for a long, long time, looked like insurmountable odds.

J. J. McC.

Northampton